Evaluating Tools That Support Pair Programming in a Distributed Engineering Environment

Executive Summary

The construction and improvement of high-quality products in a global software development environment requires flexible practices for collaboration and tools that support these practices in a distributed software development team. Pair Programming (PP), a well-known agile practice has been reported to improve software productivity and software quality in co-located environments. However, in a distributed environment PP needs stronger tool support to address new challenges like communication, distributed collaboration, and data exchange. This paper introduces a systematic tool evaluation approach for Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) and reports on an initial tool survey of open source tools.